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The Canadian ski resort of Mont-Sainte-Anne will host the first Electric-Mountain-Bike World Championships next year. The event announcement from the world governing body of cycling was met with a frosty reception from race fans, with some on social media claiming that the introduction of battery-powered e-bikes into a hitherto non-motorised sport was a “slippery slope” on the way to “cheating.” Neil McDonald, supervisor at Scotland’s Common Wheel, a Glasgow bike workshop, said that his mechanics – all of whom are enthusiast cyclists – asked: “Are the entrants going to be over 20 stone (128 kg/281lb)?”

The belief that e-bikes are ridden by the exercise-averse is widespread among cyclists. This is not an opinion shared by cycle company bean-counters. Over the last five years, sales of e-bikes in Europe have risen steeply. In 2017, sales grew by 9% in the Netherlands, 19% in Germany and a thumping 30% in France. (America had been on a similar growth spurt but the recent imposition by the Trump administration of 25% tariffs on Chinese-made e-bikes will dampen demand, fears the U.S. bike industry.)

The attraction for cycle companies is obvious: e-bikes are expensive. The Specialized Vado transport e-bike retails for $5,050, and e-mountain-bikes can cost twice as much and more.

With the pedal-powered bike market in decline there’s every incentive for the bike industry to promote its new cash cow. Bike adverts stress the sweat-free fun of e-biking, and industry organizations around the world lobby for government grants to stimulate e-bike purchases, the same sort of sweeteners handed out blithely to electric car buyers.

Some pedal-only cyclists remain unmoved. Leading cycling advocate Mikael Colville-Andersen, the founder of the Copenhagenize Design consultancy that advises cities around the world how they can go bike friendly, recently tweeted that “e-bikes are … gadgets for … probably the laziest demographic in the history of homo sapiens.”

Barbara Chamberlain, director of the Active Transportation Division in Washington State's Department of Transportation, countered: “Why not rail against derailleurs while you’re at it? They also make bicycling easier.”

Derailleurs are the spring-parallelogram gear-changing devices which, when triggered from handlebar levers, can make pedaling easier (or harder). When derailleurs were developed at the start of the 20th Century, those who rode with these new-fangled gizmos were labelled as “cheats.” Writing in 1902 after a race in which a man was beaten by a woman riding on a bike equipped with a rudimentary derailleur Tour de France founder Henri Desgrange sniffed: “Isn’t it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailleur? We are getting soft. Come on fellows.”

There are many other ways of making cycling easier, all of which could be seen as benefitting from such an “artifice.” Riding downhill offers the simplest method, yet there are no claims that using gravity is cheating, and nobody gripes that cyclists crouched over handlebars to make themselves aerodynamically smaller are somehow playing dirty. Likewise, there are zero complaints aimed at cyclists tucked in behind one another to benefit from the hole punched through the air by a lead rider.

The “cheat” list goes on. Few cyclists would now be comfortable without a freewheel, the drive-disengagement device that allows a cyclist to stop pedaling while moving. Another make-cycling-easier tactic was explored by British touring cyclist Richard Hutchins in his 1993 book Quiet Wind Assisted Cycle Routes Between [British Rail] Stations: not then and not today would any cyclist cry foul at getting a helping hand from a stiff breeze.

When describing the benefits of electric bikes, sales folk often use the “tailwind” analogy. You get a battery-powered push, but you have to pedal to get it. This is not so in China and Israel where e-bikes are genuinely pedal-free. And certain categories of electric bikes in the U.S. can also be throttle-controlled. However, European e-bikes are pedal-assist only with the motor cutting out at speeds above 15.5mph. Even unfit cyclists can and do ride their e-bikes faster than this.

E-biker in DusseldorfCarlton Reid

Because they have to spin constantly, pedal-assisted e-bike riders most definitely exert themselves, as anecdotally noted by e-cyclists who track their fitness via wearables such as the FitBit or the Apple Watch.

There’s also a growing body of scientific evidence that demonstrate the fitness potential of e-bike riding. A May 2018 study by researchers from the University of Basel in Switzerland found that e-bike riding had comparable health benefits as regular bicycling. After four weeks of pedal-assisted riding the overweight participants recorded improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness, and the improvements were little different to those recorded by those in a control group riding pedal-only bicycles.

Using an e-bike can “help overweight and older individuals to maintain fitness training on a regular basis,” concluded one of the study authors. Professor Arno Schmidt-Trucksäss added: “Those who use e-bikes on a regular basis benefit … not only in terms of their fitness, but also in terms of other factors such as blood pressure, fat metabolism, and their mental well-being.”

This chimes with earlier studies. Writing in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder claimed in 2016 that e-bike riders get an “effective workout” and they benefit from the same health benefits as pedal-only cyclists. Twenty sedentary commuters had their health measured and were tasked with traveling to work by e-bike instead. After a month, the participants demonstrated improved aerobic capacity with better blood sugar control.

In 2017, a Norwegian study revealed that e-bike riders are physically active for 95% of riding time. Publishing in the International Journal of Behaviour Nutrition and Physical Activity researchers found that e-bike riders were 8.5 times more active than when static, while pedal cyclists were 10.9 times more active, a closer margin than the researchers had previously assumed.

While these studies, and more, add heft to the fact that e-cycling leads to health gains it may take some time to convince traditional cyclists that riding an e-bike is not cheating. How long might this take? It was 34 years after his “come on fellows” comment before Desgrange allowed derailleurs to be used in the Tour de France.

I was Press Gazette's Transport Journalist of the Year, 2018. I'm also an historian – my most recent books include "Roads Were Not Built for Cars" and "Bike Boom", both published by Island Press, Washington, D.C.